This is the latest post in a
series
about Bertrand Russell's essay
Why I am not a Christian, in which I run through his various
arguments and show that for the most part (there are a few exceptions)
they either don't apply to
classical theism, or are just completely invalid in the first place.
Russell's essay is split into several
topics, the first of which (after his introduction) is to discuss some
philosophical arguments often used in favour of the existence of God. He
intends to dismiss these arguments to help justify his claim that there is
no valid evidence for the existence of God.
So far, I have discussed the cosmological and what Russell calls the
natural law argument. Now it is time for the argument from design. This
is one of the few places where I personally think that Russell has a point;
just not one which advances his overall case.

The modern argument from design is a relatively recent addition to the
stable of arguments for God (recall that I have a somewhat unusual
understanding of the word recent; I mean later than the
medieval period). There were, of course, precursors in older thought, and
some arguments (such as the teleological argument, or argument from final
causality) which today are often confused with the argument from design
even though in practice they are built on wholly different premises, and
thus need to be considered separately. I'll briefly mention the
teleological argument later on in this post.

The argument from natural law, discussed in the last post,
states that the form of physical law in
some way reflects what we would expect it to be given the nature and
character of God (and has properties we either need not or could not expect if it has some other
explanation), thus backing up the idea that God is the author of such
law, and thus that God exists. Some modern arguments, for example contemporary debates
over the anthropic principle, are examples of the natural law argument,
since they are related to the nature of physical law (in this case, the
values of various parameters used within it).
The argument from design, on the other hand, looks at material beings,
and in particular complex material objects with numerous inter-dependent
parts. The argument (in its best form) then runs as follows:

Object X could not emerge from the normal workings of the
laws of physics (and, through them, the laws of chemistry and biology, if
relevant).

Object X is observed to exist.

If it did not emerge from physics, then something else had to
lead it to come into being. This something else must be able to
intervene in the universe in a way that is beyond physics, and itself not
be bound by physics. Since physics is applicable to all material beings,
this being must be immaterial. The emergence of the object is an act
towards some end, and
the form of the object must in some way exist in the being that created
it.

The only immaterial substance capable of both acting towards some end
and of understanding abstract concepts such as forms is a mind.

Therefore there exists an immaterial mind capable of intervening in
the universe.

This immaterial mind is God.

In premise one, I mean some statement of the sort If a bacterial flagellum
existed, then it could not have emerged from the natural course of physical
law. It is entirely theoretical. Premise two looks to see whether such
things do exist; it is entirely empirical. I distinguish between
the opening two premises in this way.

Some people might question the fourth premise, but I treat this as a
matter of definition. I define a mind (yes, including our own)
as an immaterial substance or part of a substance capable of acting
towards an end, and understanding abstract concepts such as form and
structure. With this definition, the fourth premise follows immediately.
Of course, as we progress through the argumentation to God, we have to
remember that we have used this definition, and not substitute it for some
other definition of mind later.

The last And this is God also might prove problematic. If, like
I, do, we define God in effect as the terminus of the cosmological
argument, then we have more work to do to show that the end of this
argument is that same God. (Alternatively, we can define God as the end-point
of this argument, and then need to show that the cosmological argument
ends in the same place; and we also need to show that the God of the
Bible, or Koran, or whatever text we favour, is also the being we have
uncovered at the end of this argument.) One would have to show the
simplicity, unity, eternity, and so on, of the immaterial mind that is the
end-point of this argument. This requires work, and I am not fully
convinced that it has been done; the end point of the argument from design
clearly has some similarities with the end point of the cosmological
argument, but its not immediately clear that it needs to be a being of pure actuality,
eternal, unchanging and so on. But I will leave this issue to one side for this post;
it would be too much of a digression to address it.

The rest of the argument itself is, I think, sound (or can be expressed in a way that
is sound), if one can justify the first premise (and give a successful
argument for the last point). The
second point is a matter of observation which all will agree or disagree on once X has been specified, and the third,
fourth and fifth follow from the previous steps and the definitions.
Thus most of the discussion concerning this argument concentrates on the
first premise. And that is where the fun begins. To complete the argument,
we need to identify just one
object where the first premise is satisfied.

The difficulty is that proving that it is impossible for some complex structure
to emerge through the normal evolution of physical law is an immensely
difficult thing to do; as indeed is proving that it can. The first problem
is that we don't yet understand science perfectly. We have a good
understanding of physics, though there are still gaps. We understand the
electromagnetic interaction well, and the basic foundations of nuclear
physics and chemistry, although it is often difficult to go from first
principles to an exact calculation of complex substances.

There are thus two
things which which need to consider, which are not identical; firstly
applicable scientific law; and secondly our knowledge of applicable
scientific law, and what we are able to calculate from it. The further
we get from fundamental physics, the fuzzier our knowledge of scientific
law becomes and the harder precise first-principles calculations get; the more likely is that
our knowledge of the law (and more
importantly our ability to compute the consequences of the law) is in
error. However, our knowledge is what we have to work with. Thus the best
that the proponent of the argument from design can do is to say that the
emergence of being
X is impossible if the model of scientific law we are using is
correct. This is not the same as saying that it is impossible if the
true scientific law is correct. One has to have the uncertainty of our
knowledge under control: show that it is impossible for every
understanding consistent with our experiments and the philosophical
premises underlying quantum field theory. This is a very difficult task.

A formal proof of premise one of the argument from design thus requires
a detailed expert knowledge of the science in question, and one also has to have
a detailed expert knowledge to evaluate the argument. Most advocates
of the argument from design don't know enough to do this. In some examples
they put forward, nobody knows enough to do this. What we do know
is that many examples which were previously used as possible candidates for
X now can be explained solely in terms of natural law.

So instead, most advocates for the design argument rely on analogy. The
flagellum of a bacteria resembles a modern motor, with numerous
interlocking parts. Like a modern motor, if any one of the parts fails,
the whole motor would be useless and offer no survival advantage. Indeed,
an incomplete flagellum would be worse than no flagellum at all since it
would take resources from the bacteria with no gain. It is inconceivable that
a mechanical motor could come together without some designer; why should it
be any different for a biological motor? These numerous parts
are too big a step to come together in the various small mutations allowed
for by evolution by unguided genetic mutation and natural selection, and
so therefore they could not have arisen by this process. Since the various
variants of the idea of evolution by genetic mutation and natural
selection are the only known natural processes that could lead to the
flagellum, it had to have arisen either through a divinely guided series
of mutations or by direct divine intervention. Both options lead to the
first premise of the argument for design. Just as the human constructed
motor requires design, so does the biological motor.

But, of course (and as is well known), this argument as I have presented
it contains a number of flaws. Firstly, the argument from analogy is flawed because
the origin and construction of the two objects is one of the points where they
differ rather than are similar. Secondly, it argues that the complex
arrangements of physical parts could not have arisen in small steps; but the
question whether the changes in the genetic code between the non-flagellum
bacteria and the one with the flagellum are large. A small change in the
genetic code can have a big effect on the final organism. For example,
whole sections of DNA are activated or deactivated by a single letter.
Change that letter, and you create a big difference in the resulting
organism. Viruses can insert large sections of their own DNA into their
hosts, again meaning that big changes are possible in a single step.
Furthermore, it the flagellum motor does require intermediate steps, then
these steps might nonetheless confer an advantage (albeit not as big an
advantage as the full motor) to the organism. I have seen
arguments that
bacterial flagellum could arise through unguided mutation and natural
selection, outlining the individual steps that lead to the final result.
I am not a geneticist; I don't know enough to evaluate these arguments.
But even if the currently suggested paths are untenable, that does not
show that there is not a route to the flagellum that we don't yet know
about. To formally show that there is no possible route to the flagellum
seems to me to be an impossible task. And without this formal proof,
you haven't shown the first premise to be true; and without the first
premise the argument collapses. This just doesn't apply to bacterial
flagella, but any biological example.

So let us go beyond biological organisms to DNA itself. DNA is sometimes
called the book of life. And this analogy has some validity. The
individual genomes are analogous to letters; letters which merge together
to form words, and these words have a coherent meaning, interpreted
through the various biological processes that lead to the construction of
individual proteins. Now every human book needs an author.
The author puts the letters together into words, and the words are
arranged into meaning. We could not say that Hamlet was written by "random"
chance, not without there being evidence for the numerous other plays
containing nothing but gibberish that the random process would have to
produce before it came to Hamlet. Thus we can conclude that the book of
life needs an author. Hence God.

Do I even need to answer this? This is an argument from analogy, and thus
not a proof. The analogy holds in that there are similarities in the way
that DNA and a book convey information. But there are also differences,
including in how the material is stored and how it is interpreted. Since
these are more important when considering the origin of the material,
it is foolhardy to say that a human book and DNA must have the a similar
origin just because they are similar in certain (but not all) respects.
Evolution by genetic mutation and natural selection is a sufficient
process to explain how the DNA of current organisms arose from the first
simple strand of DNA; how the information was created. It doesn't matter
whether or not this form of evolution occurred in practice (and I am not
going to reveal my thoughts on the matter because what I think is
irrelevant to what is true; I am not a biologist and not an expert and
my opinion on this subject, whatever it is, counts for considerably less
than those who are experts, so on this topic read them instead of me);
that it is plausible is enough to undermine premise one of the argument
from design.

OK, so what about the origin of DNA and RNA themselves (or some other
self-replicating information storing molecule)? And not only these, but
the whole cellular infrastructure needed to mould proteins from the
information stored in DNA, and to assist them in the reproduction process.
To my knowledge (which isn't extensive, so I could be wrong), the best
we have managed to do in the lab is to create a few measly amino acids,
which decay relatively quickly, and are a long way from what we need.

But that we do not know of how DNA could have emerged from an unguided
natural process does not mean that there isn't a way that it could have
happened that we don't know about. We don't have a proof that it could
have happened; neither do we have a proof that it couldn't. And a rigorous
proof that it couldn't happen is what is needed to establish premise one
of the argument of design.

The argument from design is (for the most part, there are, of course,
exceptions) used by non-scientists to persuade other non-scientists. But
most (again, not quite all) scientists find the argument unconvincing. Every
scientist knows that humble and simple theories can inevitably lead to
complex structures. These structures form quite naturally as a consequence
of physical law. A mustard seed is simpler than a mustard tree; plant
and water it, and natural processes will produce the tree from the seed.
From the laws of electrodynamics, we see that hydrogen and oxygen will
naturally combine to make water (a more complex substance); the bonds
between water molecules, when frozen, will naturally lead to the even
more complex snowflakes. There is no design here, just physics (although,
of course, the laws of physics themselves are a description of the acts
of an intelligent agent), and matter arranging itself to fall into a local
minimum of potential energy. Is this snowflake argument also an argument
from analogy, and thus invalid? No, it is an argument from counter-example
against the proposition that simple laws cannot lead to complex results.

I hate it when I see Christians use the argument from design. All it does
is set up a straw man which a knowledgeable atheist can easily knock down.
There is nothing that convinces more of the truth of orthodox Christianity than when
I read arguments which atheists or liberals claim to be convincing but which,
when I
examine them, are easily defeated. I imagine that when atheists read a weak
argument for Christianity it has the same effect. There are much stronger
arguments for the existence of God, and these should be used instead.

But wait a minute. Aren't I a self-described Thomist? And didn't Thomas
Aquinas use the argument from design in his fifth way? No. The teleological
argument (the argument from final causality, or that beings have
tendencies towards ends) is quite different from the argument from Design.
It does not depend on complex structures; it depends on the nature of
physical law. Paley needed the watch to make his point; Aquinas just needs
the stone. Paley needed an analogy, Aquinas argues from the nature of the rock itself.

Modern atheists say that modern physics implies that there is no purpose or meaning to
the universe. Matter does not inherently decide to decay or evolve in
particular ways; it just blindly happens. A Thomist would agree with
the statement that one cannot get meaning or directionality from the material
universe alone; yet the
Thomist also observes that there are tendencies towards ends in nature;
the universe does show directionality. Where do these
come from? We agree with the atheist that it cannot be part of the
material universe. But where the atheist just says "There is no such thing,"
denying observation, the Thomist looks around for a solution.
We could just say "Physics" is behind these tendencies, but then that
isn't an answer, just a more accurate description of the problem.
What is Physics? If these
tendencies don't arise from the material universe itself, which
is what physics describes, and since they exist they must arise from
something, then they have to come from something immaterial. By definition,
this is an immaterial will. Since fundamental physics is indeterminate,
an immaterial free will. Since it is directed towards various forms,
the will must be accompanied by an intellect. It takes a little more work
to get from here to God, but
that can be done. (And if the reader doesn't find this summary of the
argument convincing, please don't reject the argument out of hand, but go
to the more in depth presentations of it, such as in the book I linked to.)

Thus my main objection to the argument of design is that it misses the
point of the main issue. For example, evolution by genetic mutation and
natural selection is, if the theist is right about what physics represents,
just the means by which God achieved His goals. The "randomness" of the
mutations (which should be interpreted as unpredictable nature of them)
is simply the result of God's free choice. If theism is true and mechanism
false, then the complex biological organisms are from both the natural
processes of physics and the work of God (these would just be two
different ways of saying the same thing). Whether God brought about the
species by a direct act or through the process of evolution doesn't affect
anything. On the other hand, if we suppose a mechanistic understanding of
physics, where the laws of physics are independent of God, then the
distinction between the direct act of a designer and a natural evolution
is important; but since the most important difference between theists and
atheists is over whether or not the laws of physics are an expression of
Gods will, those who advocate for the argument from design might (if they
are successful) win a battle or two, but they lost the war before they
even started.

That's my view, at least. But this is meant to be a commentary on Russell's
essay, so I ought to give at least a passing glance to what he himself
wrote.

For example, it is argued that Rabbits had white tails in order to make
them easier to shoot.

And to think that I moment ago, I was complaining about straw men erected by Christians.
Compared to the atheists, Christian apologists are amateurs when it comes
to straw men.

When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most
astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, will all the
things in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence
and omnipresence has been able to produce in millions of years. Do you
think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions
of years to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the
Ku-Klux-Klan or the Fascists?

Here we have a more serious objection. If God designed the world, would He
not create a better world than the one we live in? Russell made a
couple of errors in this passage which I should point out first,
because they are the sort of
mistakes that people often make. The comment about God having
millions of years to get it right is irrelevant; firstly it is billions
of years, but more importantly, since God is timeless and doesn't
perceive the succession of time, the length of time is unimportant. It
makes no difference to God whether it takes fourteen billion years to
reach His goal or one second; to God they are just the same.

Secondly, we
must note that omnipotence means not that God can do anything, but that
God can do anything logically possible and consistent with His nature.
Omniscience means that God can know everything that it is logically
possible for God to know given His nature. The precise definitions are
important for the answer to the problem of evil.

Thirdly, yes, God did
produce things better than the Ku-Klux-Klan and the Fascists: Mother
Theresa, Francis of Assisi, even Bertrand Russell himself. The question is
whether it is possible to have a species whose members can freely choose
to devote their lives to good works if they can not also make the choice
to devote their lives to fascism (which is an objective evil, even if the
fascists -- or today's anti-fascists who have the same basic mindset
as the historical fascists -- don't consider themselves as evil). [Though I
must commend Russell on this: this essay dates from 1927, before many people
were aware of the full dangers of Fascism and the other nationalistic branches of socialism
inspired by it.]

Fourthly, Russell seems to assume that the best possible world is the
one with the minimum of defects. This is not necessarily the case. It
could be the case that it is the world with the maximum amount of goodness.
A defect is an absence of goodness, not the negation of goodness. Thus
a world with two three-quarters perfect beings contains more goodness
and more defects than a world with one perfect being. Which world would
God consider better? Russell would suggest the latter; I would suggest the
former. The world with two perfect beings would be better still, but this
might not be logically possible. (We should also consider that
different types of being might have a different maximum value in this
score sheet, just as the maximum marks for a dive in an Olympic
competition depend on how well the dive was executed but are limited by
how difficult the dive was. A imperfect being with free will might score
2.1 points of goodness when the maximum is 10; that's still better than the
perfect being without free will which is given marks out of 2. This analogy
is, of course, too simplistic, but it does, I hope, illustrate the point
well enough. To defeat the argument from evil, we don't need to prove that
this circumstance is the case, only that it is plausible that it might be the
case.)

But now we must consider the word defect, and here Russell's argument
really starts to unravel. A defect presupposes a norm, an objective ideal
standard of goodness. Without that, it is impossible to say that the
world is defective. We cannot say that the existence of fascists is an evil
without having some objective standard of good and evil (i.e. not based on
our own bias as opponents of Mussolini's way of governing) which the fact
that fascists exist shows that the universe fails to meet that standard.
G.E. Moore famously argued that the concept of
goodness is undefinable (or, at least or there is no
definition we can use which corresponds to an objective morality). We can
define goodness as happiness (for example); or we can define goodness as
that which
we ought to pursue. If we take the first definition then that is not
the same as saying that we ought to pursue happiness. If we take the
second definition, then that doesn't tell us what it is that we ought to
pursue. Moore's argument (which I discuss in detail
here) was an attempt to show that there is no way to show
that a definition of the first type is equivalent to the second type of definition.

I believe that if one accepts his premises, Moore's argument is
irrefutable. Of course, like most Aristotelians, I don't accept his
premises. Goodness is defined (informally) as being fit for purpose,
or (more formally) with the capability as an individual to able to (and,
for intelligent species, desire to) fulfil the natural
tendencies of that type of being. For example, a living organism is defined (in
part) as something that has the natural tendency to reproduce; that is
if you put your various naughty bits together in the right way,
and if you are healthy and it's not the wrong time of the month then
the result will be a new life form of your species (even if that new
life dies a few weeks later in the womb). Some individuals, however,
don't have the ability to reproduce; damage to their reproductive organs
makes it impossible for them to conceive. Thus the tendency is blocked,
and this is what is meant by a defect. Since the natural tendencies define the type of
being you are (form follows finality), to desire to avoid your tendencies
is to desire to be something other than what you are, which is incoherent.
Thus the natural tendencies (or final causes) of a being both lead to
the sense of goodness as that which we ought to be and provide
an outline of what that means in practice for a particular being.
Moore's argument depended on the premise that There is no final or
formal causality. Reject this premise, as an Aristotelian would,
and the argument collapses.

So before we can even say that the world is objectively defective
(and Russell's argument requires that the defect is objective), then
we have to find some way of overcoming Moore's naturalistic "fallacy".
We can choose to overcome this by appealing to formal and final causality,
but as Aquinas showed, to accept formal and final causality directly
implies the existence of God. So this option isn't open to the

It is plausible that an agent capable of making free moral choices is
better than one which lacks that capability, regardless of the choices
that that being makes. Thus a world where people can choose to become
fascist would be better than a world where that choice is not possible.
It is inevitable that if it is possible for there to be fascists, then,
given enough time (Russell's millions of years) then there would be
fascists. Of course, God might choose to minimise the time where such
evil occurs by stepping in, ending that period of the world's history,
and recreate it anew populated by those resurrected people who freely
desired in their first life
to be made and preserved as good by God. An eternity of that world would
outweigh any evil that came from the fleeting existence of fascists, even
if the coming of fascists was a necessary step to get to the final point.
This stepping in, and active involvement of God in the new creation, would
avoid the ultimate thermodynamic demise of the universe; that is not another
defect in the universe because it won't happen, an
assurance not given by the predictions of physics (which say the opposite)
but by the promises of God, if Christianity is true (and God is the source
of physics and can set up the recreated universe as He needs to).
But that thought leads us to Christianity, so let's not go there right now.

Another way of averting the argument from causality is to say that
goodness is to be fit for purpose, and that purpose is defined by the
will of God. In that case, to say that the design is defective is
incoherent; the design is that against which defects are measured, and
the design therefore cannot be defective; the defect is in our subjective
conception of what is and isn't objectively defective. In this viewpoint,
the fascists are part of the best possible world because they display and
allow some good to be appreciated which wouldn't otherwise be evident.
God turns the fascist's localised evil, and uses it as a necessary part of
the means to reach His global state of the maximum goodness possible to
achieve in practice.

Given that Kantian ethics failed, those are the only two ways I know of
to avoid Moore's conclusions. Neither are acceptable to the atheist.
Therefore the atheist cannot say there is an objective standard of goodness.
Therefore he cannot point out aspects of the universe and call them defects.

That doesn't mean
that atheists can't be good people (or at least better people than some
theists); it merely means that there is an unconscious contradiction
between the moral code they live by and their atheistic beliefs.
So Russell's argument is thus self-contradictory, and thus invalid.
Of course, showing precisely where the contradiction lies is a harder
task; numerous theists have provided responses to the problem of evil.
My own is in here.

So, though I don't agree with his particular arguments, I agree with
Russell that the argument from design is weak. I do not believe that
a Christian should use it; if they do, they must have a rigorous proof
that leads to what I have called premise one. There are, however,
far stronger arguments for God's existence (including the teleological
argument). That this argument is invalid doesn't mean that we shouldn't be
a Christian.

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